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Free Press Staff Writer

Dinner with 50 Foods author

A dinner and book signing with Edward Behr will be held at 6 p.m., Wednesday, at Pistou restaurant, 61 Main St., Burlington; reservations and information 540-1783 Title: “50 Foods: The Essentials of Good Taste” Author: Edward Behr Publisher: Penguin Press Book price: $35

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When Edward Behr set to work on the book he calls his magnum opus, he imagined he’d select, research and write about 67 foods — those he determined to be the “essentials of good taste.” Behr, founder of the magazine “The Art of Eating,” understood that any number of foods selected for such a project is arbitrary.

Why not 67?

But as it turns out, the food writer who lives in St. Johnsbury yielded to symmetry and alliteration. His recently published book is titled “50 Foods: The Essentials of Good Taste (Penguin Press, $35). Behr worked on the book for 10 years, a food anthology he conceived of and wrote with hopes it would appeal to wide audience.

“My goal was to address at the same time both a top chef and any food-lover at all, and make them both happy,” Behr wrote in an email.

His book, organized alphabetically, moves from anchovies to walnuts. Other foods Behr discusses include dark chocolate, lemons, pears, rye bread and salmon. He devotes five pages to cream and eight pages to vinegar. Among the topics he discusses are a food’s origins, varieties, tastes and uses.

Behr agreed to winnow his list of 50 to a five for purposes of this article — in which the Burlington Free Press asked a handful of Vermont food-lovers to select their five essential foods.

Choosing five essential foods was “painfully hard” Behr said.

It is also a fun parlor game, one my family played throughout Christmas week.

My mother chose onions to fill her top two slots. My niece needs lentils. One sister says bananas, another Brussels sprouts. My daughter picks dill pickles. Peanut butter got a lot of play. I love chopped chicken liver and sashimi, but left both off my list in favor of a more basic five.

My essential five are a shifting group, meaning that next week they might be different, and they aren’t balanced, but they’re all really delicious. I live in North America and they reflect a Western bias. Missing at the moment is fruit. My sixth essential might be pears.

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Here are the five.

Beef: Well-raised beef is so full-flavored and delicious, so central to eating in many cultures, that it belongs on any carnivore’s list. I like the flavor that comes from grass feeding, and I like some fat marbling from either very rich grass or a little grain at the end. For me, essential beef has a bit of extra fat.

Chicken: In its lighter way, it’s as appealing as beef. In taste, it’s probably the meat most people would choose to eat most often. Everything about it is wonderful, not least the crisp, deep golden skin.

Bread: Going back in time, the single most essential food in the West was always bread. Fresh bread is wonderful in itself, and of course it goes with everything. Of all the diverse kinds, I would choose a big, round country loaf, which at least in the West is the archetype of bread.

Gruyère: Some kind of big hard cheese is essential to eating, and if I had to choose just one kind it would be Gruyère, the mountain cheese produced in France and Switzerland. The origins of Gruyère go far back in time, and its flavor is one of the easiest and most adaptable. A great, long-aged Gruyère is one of the greatest foods of all.

Lettuce: Even the shortest list of essential foods requires something extremely fresh, and lettuce, with its delicate flavor and varied textures, is one of the most important of all foods. If I had to choose the most essential variety, I’d say Tennis Ball, a Boston type. It has excellent flavor and the most velvety, tender leaves with crunch from the crisp ribs.

Sarah Moran, dietitian and owner of Cloud 9 Caterers in Colchester

Any type of fin fish, particularly cheeks. Simple, clean and very satisfying.

Fresh berries of all varieties from wild black raspberries that we pick on our property in southern Vermont to gooseberries that are harder to find.

Kale. Kale works in everything from stews to salads. It is versatile and I feel like Popeye when I eat it.

Duck. From confit to Peking. If it is on a menu I order it.

Velveeta. My dirty little secret. I don’t care if it is one molecule away from plastic. It tastes like love to me.

(Page 3 of 5)

Adam Raftery, chef/co-owner Wooden Spoon Bistro in South Burlington

Balsamic reduction: I put this on everything from fish to vegetables

Sriracha: No breakfast is complete without it

Vermont maple syrup: It somehow finds its way into everything I cook

Cheese: Any kind, I have never said “no” to the question “Would you like cheese with that?”

Vermana herbals: Rosie Day, a great friend of mine, makes this stuff and a drop or two is excellent in a cocktail!

Jason Van Dine, chef, Pizzeria Verita

Fresh made mozzarella: I started making it here at Pizzeria Verita and it instantly shot to the top of my favorite foods ever. Freshly made, warm mozzarella is divine.

Tofu/seitan: To me, as a long-time vegetarian these two are essential. When they are cooked just right, I don’t feel I am missing out on much not eating meat.

Hot peppers: All of them. What a dull, puritan world it would be without hot peppers. Like the town in “Footloose” before the dancing.

Esopus Spitzenburg: I always look forward to City Market’s fall apple display. Let’s just say I’ve tried them all and this one tops the bill by a country mile.

Gummy bears: Haven’t outgrown them yet. I even traveled to Germany in search of the perfect one. Haribo makes a great gummy and City Market has one in bin No. 775 that’s pretty decent.

If by “essential” you mean can’t-get-through-the-kitchen-day-without-it, my list is boring: Farm eggs, olive oil, garlic, coffee and dark bread. If you mean the foods I savor most, anticipate and linger over, only artisan bread (Gerard’s, Bread and Butter Farm three-seed, O Bread sesame wheat) stays on the essentials list. My remaining four: tomatoes, but only in August and only from the garden. Homemade mayonnaise, the staple whose round, lemony flavor I learned to love in my southern grandmother’s kitchen. Cabot Clothbound Cheddar — cheddar transcendent, cheddar transformed from supermarket staple to food of the gods. Bread, cheese, tomatoes, homemade mayonnaise: I guess I’ve described a sandwich, though I would never mix mayonnaise and cheese. And, finally, an addiction acquired late in life to bitter greens — astringent broccoli raab, sharp arugula, bitter radicchio — to wake up a palate soothed by all that bread and cheese.

(Page 4 of 5)

Melissa Pasanen, food writer:

Yogurt: Thick and plain ? made from whole milk ? creamy, tart and clean calling only for a drizzle of honey, maple syrup or a dollop of good jam. It’s a pure blank canvas, easily transformed into a savory sauce or dip with herbs, minced garlic or shallot, slivered cucumber or radish. At a garage sale a few years back, I found one of those yellow and white Salton yogurt makers like my mom had in the ‘70s. It was gathering dust until my husband threatened to put it in the basement and I finally made my own with some local organic milk jump-started with a spoonful of Butterworks yogurt (my bought favorite): delicious.

Honey: My name means honey bee and I’ve been bewitched by bees and honey since I can remember. Both the creatures themselves and the golden stuff they spin to sustain themselves fascinate me. The taste of honey can vary markedly from floral to piney to musky depending on where the bees buzz, one of my favorite examples of how environment can change a food’s flavor.

Peaches: Peaches never attracted my attention until I ate one off the back of a truck in the Greek islands, sweet as the sun with that velvety, juicy and just barely resistant bite. They are more special to me, I think, because a perfect peach is rare in the northern parts of the world where I’ve spent most of my life and they don’t travel well. During a good year for Vermont-grown peaches, I become a glutton and pick way too many. They make me feel like the poor children in the storybooks who couldn’t believe their luck in finding an orange in the toe of their Christmas stocking.

Crusty bread: Crunching through the crust of a country-style, wood-fired loaf of naturally leavened bread into the tangy, springy crumb satisfies me in so many ways. A really great loaf doesn’t even need butter, although I do love butter.

Farmstead cheese: My kids challenged me to pick between bacon and cheese and I’m cheating a bit because the world of cheese is vast and I’m not going to pick a style. I am one of those people who crave cheese like others need chocolate. I couldn’t possibly choose between aged Cheddar with those magical crystal spangles and perfectly ripe and oozing mushroomy, bloomy-rinded or pungent, washed-rinded wheels. The animal husbandry and craftsmanship behind farmstead cheese (made on-farm with the milk of that farm’s herd or flock) commands my immense respect.

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If you also let me have crunchy sour pickles and a good dry hard cider, I believe I could live happily on the above.

Sally Pollak, food writer:

The trick for me was to choose among vegetables, fruit and cheese, with whole grain bread and eggs. Lettuce was a natural because I eat salad every night, it’s the food I have to have with every meal — or at least want with every meal. My fruit is apples; I’m happy with a Mac.

I settled on feta for my cheese, having gone back and forth between cheddar and feta. But then Behr’s email arrived with his pick of Gruyere, and I realized he had trumped me. Now that I know what a fresh egg tastes like, eggs are in.